Linux

I've had Fedora updates screw up so many times and spent way too many hours fixing mutually conflicting updates that I have really come to loath the OS. I keep a Fedora server running for my customers who are Redrat enthusiasts but Ubuntu is so much better behaved.

What do you prefer? Linux allows multiple desktops to be installed. I use Mate primarily but I also have lxde installed as a backup in case something breaks.

I would recommend slackware or devuan with xfce or lxde

Just use Linux Mint, cinnamon edition, and then edit the startup app list to not load some of the stuff that take too much ram, like the reports, nvidia, etc. Also remove fwupd if you updated your laptop's firmware already via windows. I personally also stop bt (frees overall 30 mb of ram). Make sure during installation that you create a 4 GB swap partition too. At the end, I have a system that starts up at 750 MB of RAM (htop reading, 980 MB with gnome-system-monitor). As long as I use only 2-3 Chrome tabs, I'm ok to not swap. Firefox uses more ram i'm afraid, especially with youtube.

I have 4 laptops here run linux mint with 4 gb of ram. They run fine, my husband even does development in one of these.

The n3060 cpu is slow at 660 PassMark points, just enough for Mint to function. XFce is a tad faster indeed, and uses about 60 MB less RAM, however, it's missing some desktop options that I find useful (e.g. disabling tap and drag).

Try a few live disks out. See what works best with your hardware and workflows. I like Fedora with KDE Plasma, personally. But I prefer RHEL based to Debian based stuff and I don't like the direction Ubuntu is beimg taken for monetization.

I've tried many desktop environments: Flux, Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, Mate, Enlightenment, OpenBox, TWM, and screens. Naturally, Gnome prevailed. I can't resist a system that allows for endless tweaking.

@thatonecoder unless i missed it, it looks like no one suggested puppy linux! it's very light and some variants (bookworm pup) has wayland options (32 bit and xorg options as well) and full apt usage.

I am not sure that using Wayland is your best choice here. Based on laptop specs it is not like you are going to game on it. And for web and office tasks x11 still offers a better experience. On Wayland you would have problems with things like scaling, screen capturing etc. They are (to some extend) solvable, but are tricky to fix, especially with your lack of terminal experience.

Also I would not care that much for cutting-edge repositories. They are usually required for support of the new hardware (which of cause is not the case here).

Also, almost all modern DE are somewhat the same in terms of resource consumption. Some are a bit heavy (for example Cinnamon is heavier than xfce) but the difference if almost negligible. The majority of resources would be consumed by a browser, not DE. If you still wish to have the lightest DE possible, than you are limited to LXQT. XFCE nowadays is not as light as it used to be. You can have a very good performance with window managers like openbox and alike. For panel you can use polybar, tint or whatever. But that would require some configuration from you. Such setup is available in MX Linux. I suggest you to take a look at that distro, it is kinda good for old laptops. Of cause, standalone Wayland compositors (sway, hyprland, labwc, wayfire etc.) are very good, but they would require you to do a lot configuration work to set everything working. Even distros that ship them preinstalled (like Fedora Sway spin, for example) have somewhat broken defaults.

I'd probably go with Mint XFCE or those listed, or you can search for distros that target older hardware. I'll get back to yo on that.

Edit: so, @[email protected], my main search was focusing on minimal distros for old hardware (less that 1 GiB of RAM that support x86 (i.e. 32 bit)), these may fit the bill: Tiny Core, Puppy, Porteus, Absolute, antiX, Q4OS, Slax, Sparky, MX, Bohdi, Zorin Lite, Xubuntu, Archbang, Slitaz, DSL.
From here on we're on "may need ≥ 1 GiB" territory: Lubuntu, Lite, MATE, Peppermint, LXLE, LMDE, bunsenlabs, Crunchbang++, EasyOS.

Again, my focus was on low RAM usage and preferably supporting x86. Most distros aren't Wayland-ready yet, bare that in mind.
As most said, Mint with XFCE is a good start and most distros offer a "live" version you can boot to try without installing.

What use cases are you planning for it? I mean, antiX would totally rock on that machine. However having Wayland, being lightweight and easy to maintain is kinda tough to find. Lose Wayland part, it's antiX. Lose lightweight part, it's Pop OS, openSUSE Leap, etc. Lose easy to maintain part (for a newbie), it's Arch (mostly derivatives that come with a GUI installer).

Though if I was preparing that device for someone else, I would probably go with LMDE.

LMDE. And this is as someone who has used a ton of distro over the years and now just rolls that whenever asked. I prefer the Debian Edition; Mint feels hacky in comparison, almost like snaps and stuff have been ripped out to make the distro something it is not...

Why do people recommend mint xfce over cinnamon? Is not the cinnamon version better for a newbie?

I personally recommend Mint, but ultimately others will have different opinions and you decide what you want.

Mint is often the most recommended distro, because whatever you may need to do in it, it tends to be easy-ish to figure out.

But these days I would strongly recommend in favor of some immutable distro like Bluefin/Aurora or Silverblue/kinoite. Instead of being easy to figure out how to do things on them, they make it so you won't need to, ever.

It's a complete paradigm shift and it might not be for everyone, but in the decades I've been using Linux for, I had never had such a smooth experience with any distro. Everything just works and you don't need to think about the OS anymore.

However it won't easily fit with some of the requirements you listed.

Mint would probably be the safest bet. You could also take a look at Manjaro XFCE, though Manjaro is a bit more advanced than what it sounds like you're looking for. There's also Zorin OS with their "lite" version which runs a modified XFCE that would probably work for your needs.

However, if you go for Mint, I'd definitely go for XFCE. I've never used labwc myself and I'm more of a Plasma guy, but XFCE is, in my own experience, a very good DE for a low-spec system. With the increasing spread of Wayland, I wouldn't be shocked to see Wayland support on XFCE in the future. Cinnamon actually has an experimental Wayland version and it's not as resource-heavy as some might think I have a 2012 laptop running Mint Cinnamon and it runs surprisingly well on that system. Then again, if you're just going for a minimalist installation, it's not necessary.

When in doubt: Linux Mint.

You can find something more suitable for your need later on, but this should give you a baseline experience.

I would steer clear of labwc or other minimalist WMs when you're just getting started. In fact, try nothing but the basics first.

As a complete newbie with those specs, I'd try Mint Xfce edition.

You are thinking too hard I think in the wrong direction. Use Mint unless you have a strong feeling/need for something else. In which case, use that. Choice of first distro is not really that important. Pick a popular one and if it's wrong for you, you'll figure it out.

What you haven't mentioned is any research you have done regarding hardware support/compatibility for your specific device. I searched the specs you listed and it came up with some netbooks like CB012DX. I actually have an older, shittier version of this device running a debian derivative. (Mint is also in the debian family FYI.) And I've had fun installing various linuxes on even older, shittier ~~chrome~~netbooks over the years.

Assuming yours is in this ballpark, I have one really important piece of advice for you. Before you think anymore about it, download ISOs of your top 1 or 3 distro choices, flash them to USB and attempt to boot. These super cheap devices cut corners on components. It is not unlikely that you will have some hardware that either doesn't have open source drivers, or has some sort of theoretical support that will be too esoteric for you to implement at your current skill level. It is quite common on these devices that everything works fine except networking or something like that. So you might be able to exclude some of your choices based on that. Try to find a distro that works reasonably well out of the box.

You should find the various names your device goes by

As you have probably read, booting from a flashed USB is non-destructive of you normal system (unless you choose to format your disk or something of course). Assuming you have no issues booting, try out all the hardware features you have like: trackpad (different kinds of click, drag, zoom etc), ethernet, wireless (2.4 + 5ghz network), bluetooth, speakers, headphones, external input device, external displays, fingerprint scanner, touch screen, all keys and buttons, cameras, mics, sensors, keyboard lights. Any external devices you like to use: mice, keyboards, dongles, should also be included. I suggest making a list and systematically checking each item.

You can use this amazing tool called ventoy to flash one USB boot drive to have multiple distros available. You can even keep a windows ISO on there. It will even let you reserve a portion of the disk for persistent storage. Ventoy substantially improves this whole process so you don't have to have 10 different USB disks floating around. It is well designed and straight forward to use.

So on my current netbook, I was lucky that networking has been no problem. people with a slightly different model have to use an external wifi dongle (and not all wifi dongles are compatible with linux). I have never gotten anything form the speakers, but they might have arrived broken, apparently it's pretty easy to blow out the speakers and I didn't test while ChromeOS was still installed. Using an arch-based distro, the touch screen worked but now in Debian it doesn't. I don't really care about that. I really wanted Bluetooth to work and I couldn't for the longest time til one day it just magically solved itself and I haven't reinstalled since then because I am not sure I'd be able to re-solve it.

The other piece of advice has to do with storage. Depending what software you run, it can require a bit of space. 64gb could be gone quickly. This will be somewhat controversial (for good reason) but I always end up devoting the full eMMC to the system partition and having a permanently mounted SD card for /home, user storage and maybe even some of the system temp directories. This goes against common advice because SD cards are more prone to failure. So you need to have a good backup plan or just accept the risk. But if you run out of storage space on your system drive you can get yourself into the kind of mess that requires reinstalling.

In terms of both storage and RAM/CPU use, you will want to be extremely judicious of you application use. Firefox is a beast on any operating system.If you like to have a bunch of hungry tabs going on, you can't really optimize the OS.

I was looking for similar answers and just couldn’t figure out what really mattered. Then I used this site: Distro Chooser

It asks a lot of questions, but I think they nailed the best choice for my needs and preferences.

Arch. Yes, it is a tough start, yes, you'll type stuff on the terminal, but my good god...

• Their documentation is the best.
• You will learn a lot.
• You'll get the cool stuff before anybody else.
• Your system will be as snappy as it can get.
• updates? one single command is all you need.
• your nerd friends will worship you, and your non-nerd friends will think you are a wizard.
• Once you pass the ~~initiation~~ installation, your system can look as pretty as any other distro.

My advice is don't take any advice. Just download the ones you are most interested in and then flash and try one by one until you feel at home.

My advice: try them all, then decide. They are all free. Most offer live systems. It will only cost you time, which will be well spent learning.

tl;dr: Break things and have fun.